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Publishing Templates to VMware vSphere

Written by James Weir - 13 july 2012

This tutorial explains how to use UForge to generate and publish ESXi images to VMware's vSphere product.

As a pre-requiste, you will need to have an account on a UForge platform. If you don't have access to one, you can sign up for free to UShareSoft's UForge Online platform. I am also assuming that you have actually built an appliance or template already. If this is all new to you, then you can follow the video that helps you build your first appliance.

There are three main steps:

Generate the actual ESXi image from the appliance template you have created

Create a “Cloud Account” with the vSphere credential information. This is the information that UForge requires to upload and register the generated image to the vSphere's datastore. UForge uses the vSphere APIs to do this.

Publish the generated image (that is residing on UForge) to vSphere

Generating the Image

Choose the template you wish to generate the image for (from your Appliance Library) and then click on the “Generate” button. This will give you a list of all the formats you have access to.

Choose “VMware ESXi” image format.

Add the disk size and memory size you wish to use (note that the memory can be changed in vSphere later)

Click “Generate”.

UForge will now use the template model, check package dependencies and build the ESXi image. While we are waiting for the image to finish generating (usually takes a few minutes), lets setup the credential information.

Creating a vSphere “Cloud Account”

Inside the UForge Builder UI:

Click on the “My Account” tab > “Cloud Accounts”.

Click on the “vSphere Account” in the list on the left-hand side.

Provide a name (can be anything you wish to identify this account); the IP address where the vSphere instance is running (or the fully qualified domain name) as well as the user and password used to authenticate with the vSphere instance.

Once you are done, click “Save”.

Publish the Generated Image

Once the image has been generated, you can publish the image to vSphere. This image will be stored in one of the vSphere's datastores. In order to publish the image from UForge to vSphere you will need to know the name of the datastore where you want to publish the image to. To get the datastores available from vSphere:

Log into the vSphere instance

Click on the “Summary” tab

Under the resources section, the Storage table displays all the available datastores. In my case, I have two datastores “datastore1” and “datastore2”.

Lets now publish our image to “datastore1”. Go to the UForge Builder UI, and view the template where we have generated the ESXi image. To publish:

Click on the little green arrow (greater than). This will display the publish screen.

Choose the account to use for the publish (the account we created in step 1), the datastore name (in this case “datastore1”) and the directory name where to store the image in the datastore – let's use “mytemplates” (this can be any name you choose, (but please don't use spaces in the name). Then click the "publish" button